glow, whir
and babble:
film at 100by Peter Frank
Years in the making! A cast of thousands
(well, hundreds)! Financed by Time/Warner,
MCA/Universal, Fox and Paramount (among
others)! Hovering on the horizon for
several years, "Hall of Mirrors: Art and
Film Since 1945" was originally conceived
as a city-wide extravaganza with which
Hollywood's two major modern-art museums
would celebrate the 100th anniversary of
the medium that built the industry that
built the town. But the Los Angeles County
Museum bowed out, so the L.A. Museum of
Contemporary Art mounted what was left of
the sprawling multimedia confabulation in
its mammoth Temporary Contemporary space
(renamed around the same time, by apparent
coincidence, the Geffen Contemporary, in
honor of a $5-million gift to MOCA from
film mogul David Geffen). There the show
glows, whirs and babbles through midsummer.
Featuring works by 90 visual artists and
filmmakers, "Hall of Mirrors" is a funhouse
maze of art works and projected film
displays, installed by the design team of
Craig Hodgetts and Ming Fung. Beyond an
installation piece by Stan Douglas at the
entry, visitors thread their way through
175 art objects spread throughout 15
installations, including one sit-down
theater and a number of "viewing stations"
featuring excerpts from foreign films and
Hollywood movies.
MOCA curator Kerry Brougher has divided the
show into three chronological sections. The
first, spanning 1945 to `65, is called
"Lost Illusions: Dismantling the Dream
Factory." It focuses on the self-reflexion
of both avant-garde art and Hollywood film
in an era the curator identifies as the
cradle of the postmodern. The iconic power
of movie stardom is the subject of
assemblage works by Joseph Cornell, Bruce
Conner, Ray Johnson and Mimmo Rotella,
while the sociology of the movie theater is
explored in photographs by Robert Frank,
Diane Arbus and Weegee (preceded by Edward
Hopper in painting). Dennis Hopper's early
photos cast a jaundiced lens on the
underside of movie production. These same
subjects found their way into films by
cineastes as diverse as Jean-Luc Godard,
Alfred Hitchcock and Billy Wilder as well.
The second section, called "Cinema Degree
Zero: Testing the Limits," focuses on the
1960s and `70s, identifying the overarching
impulse of this period as one of formal
reduction--especially of narrative content
and the resulting exposure of visual and
mechanical structure. Andy Warhol provides
a bridge between the first and second
sections, elevating--or reducing--the film
icon to near-stasis in his early screen
tests while destabilizing painting with
uninflected repetition and Muybridge-like
sequentiality. The Minimalist-inspired
examination of the basic properties of the
cinema is represented in the films of
Canadian artist Michael Snow, the
photographs of film historian Hollis
Frampton, the conflation of film and live
performance by Carolee Schneemann, the
"materialized" films of Stan Brakhage and
the stuttering frame-to-frame monochromies
of Peter Kubelka, Paul Sharits and Tony
Conrad. Such art-world experiments are
compared to the radically reduced and re-
organized narratives of Godard,
Michelangelo Antonioni and Kenneth Anger.
John Baldessari's photographs
recontextualing movie stills, and photographer
Hiroshi Sugimoto's movie-theater
apparitions provide the segue
from this cinema minima into the
most recent period, which Brougher labels
"Rear Window: Fragments of the Cinematic
Past." Here the postmodern condition reigns
supreme, indiscriminately combining
personal memory, projected fantasy, social
critique, camp and parody. Judith Barry,
Douglas Blau, Victor Burgin, Derek Jarman,
Sharon Lockhart, Chris Marker, Annette
Messager, Raul Ruiz, Ed Ruscha, Cindy
Sherman and Jeff Wall represent the
extravagances of what could be called an
astringent but baroque era.
An exhibition as complex and ambitious, and
yet as selective, as "Hall of Mirrors"
necessarily omits many more appropriate
artists than it includes. One can still
cavil at certain exclusions that seem
glaring. I wonder, for instance, why Hans
Richter's Dreams That Money Can Buy (1947)
that grand collaborative dream-film of
artistic Euro-exiles in New York, is not
included. And what explains the absence of
anything by cine-tableauist Jean-Marie
Straub? I also wonder why Robert Longo and
Jack Goldstein, Cindy Sherman's movie-
struck comrades-in-art, are not
represented, and question the absence of
Jonas Mekas, paterfamilias to the whole
`60s underground film scene.
If Brougher makes any egregious misstep in
his overall curatorial conception, it is
the incomplete distinction he makes between
artists' fascination with movies and their
fascination with the physical mechanisms of
film itself. Cameras and film, projectors
and screens may inherit much of their
mystique from their association with
Hollywood productions, but for artists
these devices and the effects they produce
have their own discrete allure. Brougher
does not separate the lights and camera
from the action, but his artists do.
The show as a whole, and by its latter
section especially, has an elegiac feeling,
a notion that cinema as we know it, and the
art it engenders, is fast passing into
history. Film is giving way to videotape;
as a result, the movie theater, so central
to the filmic experience as Brougher
describes it, is gradually yielding to the
"home entertainment unit." This transition
in turn points to the imminent subsuming of
all cinematic, and artistic, practice into
the cybercognitive revolution. As this
environment shrinks from the silver screen
to the boob tube to the laptop and on down
the rabbit hole, what is filmic becomes no
longer cinematic. Are movies still movies
when divested of their theatricality? When
you can look at them in your lap like a
paperback? The next 50 years will tell. In
the meantime, Brougher intimates, this is
the way the film ends: not with a FIN but a
floppy disk.
"Hall of Mirrors: Art and Film Since 1945"
is at L.A. MOCA's Geffen Contemporary
through July 28, 1996. The show travels to
the Wexner Center, Columbus, Ohio, Sept.
21, 1996-Jan. 5, 1997; the Palazzo
dell'Esposizioni, Rome, summer 1997; and
the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art,
Oct. 11, 1997-Jan. 21, 1998.
Peter Frank is art critic for the L.A.
Weekly and editor of Visions art quarterly.